April 17, 2013
Not just fine
“But something about new motherhood also darkened my worldview and made the thought of those cries more threatening. This is where you may be wondering if I’m just talking about post-partum depression, but the struggles I have in mind are unlikely to raise any significant red flags at the six-week check-up. And while, being raised in a family of psychologists, I certainly asked myself whether I might have PPD, I generally didn’t find that line of questioning helpful.
Don’t get me wrong—it’s an important question that we should keep asking ourselves and each other, and we should seek treatment unapologetically if the answer might be yes. But the problem with that question as our primaryapproach to the struggles of new motherhood is that it suggests that the post-partum experience itself is just fine, unless of course you have a legitimate clinical illness that distorts your perception of it. And the post-partum experience is not just fine. It is immensely, bizarrely complicated. It is, at various times and for various people, grueling and joyful and frightening and beautiful and disorienting and moving and horrible. There’s a lot going on there that will never make its way into the DSM V.”
-from “Before I Forget: What Nobody Remembers About New Motherhood” by Jody Peltason, whose standout line was “” We thought it would be sitcom-style hard.” Yes, indeed!
April 16, 2013
Upside down
I am quiet this week, mostly because I am reading Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings and that’s all I really want to do. What I don’t want to be doing is fretting about Baby being breech, but alas this seems to be my fret of the moment. I’m waiting for an ultrasound that will confirm either way. At least Baby is not transverse ala Harriet, which means the ending of this story has yet to written. Fingers crossed, but I’m pulling out all the stops this time, which is to say that I might discover what moxibustion is, and anything else that could possibly help turn the wee one. And if baby is breech, I will then be really concerned about why its bum is so head-like in its composition. What kind of anatomy is that?
In good news, I’ve worn capri pants and sandals two days in a row. Not entirely sensibly, but altogether happily. And at least the sun is shining.
April 14, 2013
The Douglas Notebooks by Christine Eddie
I was attracted to The Douglas Notebooks by Christine Eddie first because it is a beautiful object, a small and lovely book whose cover is adorned with blossoms and brambles that wind their way throughout the book entire. I was attracted to it also because the book in its original French had been the recipient of several literary awards, and French Quebec fiction is such unexplored territory for me. I welcome Goose Lane Editions publishing this English translation (by Sheila Fischman), widening my literary landscape as they did by publising Australian lit-award winner Night Street by Kristel Thornell last year. What a service to English Canadian readers to bring us these books we mightn’t encounter otherwise.
The Douglas Notebooks is branded “a fable”, which I’ll admit did not attract me to the book. I like my novels in the here and now, thank you very much, peopled by people instead of scurrying creatures. But “fable” here is a label loosely applied (for example, there are no talking rabbits, and apparently fables are meant to have morals but I’m not sure what the moral is here), and I often find that any novel I read in translation has an element of “fable” about it anyway, or at least sone kind of otherness. Here is not the novel in the shape I know it, I mean, and they always seem a little bit otherworldly. I have to judge a novel in translation on its own basis as well, and not based on what I understand “the novel” to be in my own limited experience of the form.
Which is not to say that The Douglas Notebooks is difficult to approach as a reader, or that I had to work hard to enjoy it. On the contrary, it was an easy book to slip inside, a fast and lively read. It seems out of place and out of time, situated in a village that doesn’t appear on a map and that for most of the book remains out of touch with progress and the rest of the world, though there are indications–the telltale tattoo on the schoolteacher’s arm, for example, which situates the book inside history. It’s the story of Romain, the son of a rich family who escapes them as soon as he can for a solitary life in the woods where he can be free. He enounters Elena, who has fled her violent homelife and made an apprenticeship with the village “pharmacist”, learning from her natural and herbal remedies for illness. But Elena leaves the pharmacist to make a life in the woods with Romain, who has since been remamed Douglas, for the fir tree. When Elena becomes pregnant, the couple feels as though their dreams will be fulfilled, and that with their child they will create a new world and a new way of life far removed from the trappings of society. But plans go wrong, and the result is heartbreak.
Brought into their fold are the local doctor who had loved Elena from afar, and the schoolteacher who had always been an outsider in the community, as well as a tamarack tree with mythical properties. In the centre of it all is the baby Rose, and the love that is wrapped around her like the brambles on the novel’s cover, both protection and a trap.
The Douglas Notebooks is a peculiar book, a tricky thing, and I’m not surely I’ve completely made sense of it yet. Why it’s a fable, for example, and what it means that this very rural book with all its natural elements (including, most wonderfully, a reverence for trees) is sort of structured cinematically, with the novel broken into sections with titles like “Wide Shot”, “Fast Motion” and “Close-Up” and even “Credits (in order of appearance)” as the book’s conclusion. But the unanswered questions are not unsatisfying, rather they underline for me in this slim and quiet book are just depths I haven’t plumbed yet.
April 12, 2013
Stick Figure Families and the Punch List
Photo by Helen Spitzer
When I was pregnant with Harriet and in my third trimester, I started creating something called a “punch list”. Let’s just say I was not the picture of serenity. And as I move toward the final month of this pregnancy, the same old rage is taking hold, and today I’ve channelled it into a post at Bunch about the inexplicable nature of stick figure family car stickers. And I really do think that “fucking Fido Dido” is the best line I’ve ever written. Dare to argue, and I’ll likely punch you.
April 11, 2013
A Book for Baby's Library
I bought a book for the new baby this week, the very first book of this baby’s own. It’s Welcome, Baby, a gorgeous new board book by Barbara Reid that I’m sort of thinking was written just for our new baby. If you know Barbara Reid’s illustrations, then you already know the book is beautiful–I’m in love with the quilt on the title page. “Welcome, baby, welcome!/ All the world is new,/ And all the world is waiting/ To be introduced to you…” the book begins, with a picture of a couple holding their new little one, a tree and robin just outside the window. And what I really love is that older siblings are a part of this welcome too, and so Harriet gets to point to the picture of Big Kid and Baby playing trucks, and saying, “That’s me!” of the former, and so too with the picture of the siblings splashing in the paddling pool. It ends, “We’ll hold you close,/ And let you fly.” which is just perfect, and the whole trick of being a parent really. I look forward to reading this one over and over, and in delighting as new tiny hands learn to grasp its pages.
April 10, 2013
Glossolalia by Marita Dachsel
Marita Dachsel is a friend, and I was already inclined to like her new book Glossolalia because I’ve got a thing for obscure historical figures/stories whose voices are resurrected via poetry. In Glossolalia, the stories belong to the 34 polygamous wives of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons, though Dachsel is careful to point out that her book is not meant to be a biography or a historical work. Rather, as Sharon McCartney explained with her Laura Ingalls Wilder poems, “the voices, the characters and the details are vehicles, a way to say what I want to say.”
Glossolalia is a curious, wonderful book, in which a “self-avowed agnostic feminist uses mid-nineteenth century Mormon America as a microcosm for… universal emotions…”. Through Smith’s wives, each one with her own name, point of view and distinct voice, Dachsel explores ideas about love, marriage, pregnancy, motherhood, jealousy, domesticity, sex, trust, and betrayal. While the poems themselves are united by their representation of the voices of Smith’s wives, their styles and approaches are remarkably diverse, some written with formality and great distance, others more ribald and contemporary in tone. Apart from a few (often negative) examples, there is no sense of connection between these women, the poems showing their experiences of the world to be remarkably disparate, complicating tidy ideas of sisterhood. Dachsel’s wives are less a chorus than a cacophony, a crowd of dissonant voices, each shouting to be heard above the others.
But hear them, we do. The wives each emerge as distinct, aware, embodied, and it is the smallness and closeness of poetry (as well as their poet’s talent) that brings them so to life.
April 9, 2013
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
I never got over Behind The Scenes at the Museum, Kate Atkinson’s first novel which won the Whitbread Award in 1995 (“‘A 44-
I was ecstatic to learn, however, that her new novel would be a return to straightforward literary form. Well, not straightforward exactly, because Atkinson makes a point of taking form and exploding it into a million pieces. There is nothing at all straightforward about Kate Atkinson’s fiction, and what has always delighted me most about her literary novels is how covertly they’re all detective novels as much as Case Histories et. al. That there is ever such mystery at the core of her books–ghosts and dead bodies and things unexplained.
What is explained, however, what most readers will know because they start reading is that Life After Life comes with a gimmick. Think Sliding Doors and The Post-Birthday World, though not with parallel lives exactly but an array of them instead, strung together like a garland of paper chain dolls. Ursula Todd comes to life, then she dies, and then she’s born again and again, after each death returned to her beginnings, that night in 1910 when she comes into the world during a snowstorm. But then this isn’t even really the point, and here’s what allows Kate Atkinson to defy the bounds of genre: the point of this book isn’t the fantastic, but that it was written by Kate Atkinson and she’s wonderful.
I began this book with a strange sense of deja-vu (which was funny in itself because deja-vu is what it’s all about) because it reminded me so much of AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book, which I read four years ago when I was even more ridiculously pregnant than I am right now. The same depiction of the Edwardian middle-class family in a rural idyll (Todefright Hall vs. Fox Corner) with more children that it knows what to do with, some of whom are suspected to not really belong. And the banker father, fairy story references, connections to Germany. Both novels are setting out to do vastly different things, but in Atkinson’s I sensed an echo of the Byatt, and I loved that.
Ursula is born, Ursula dies, and then Ursula is born again, and while Atkinson does not explicitly spell out Ursula’s consciousness of her situation, her actions portray a dawning awareness that there is more to her life than just this one. This awareness manifests as strange sense of dread when she is young, that keeps her firmly on the beach where she’d drowned just a short lifetime ago. Her plight turns comical as she attempts numerous time to prevent her family’s maid from attending WW1 victory celebrations at which she’ll encounter the Spanish influenza and go on to infect Ursula and her beloved younger brother. Ursula eventually resorts to pushing her down a flight of stairs (thus saving the day), and ending up on a psychiastrist’s couch. Her parents are concerned with her oddness, her propensity for deja-vu.
Ursula comes up with clever ways of avoiding her previous mistakes, managing to make it through the 1920s and ’30s and only dying a handful of times. She falls in love, she has affairs, she stays single, she suffers a disastrous marriage, she is disgraced, she triumphs, she falters, and then is born again, determined to make her way. The connections and disconnections between Ursula and her siblings are particularly compelling. World War Two, however, proves to be an enormous impediment to Ursula’s lifeline. Again and again, she finds herself killed in the Blitz, and when she finally manages to skirt her particular explosion, other complications present themselves. Her fate seems determined to find her no matter how she goes out of her way to avoid it.
There is texture to a book like this, and the pleasure of seeing secondary characters from a wide variety of angles–Ursula’s mother in particular whose role in the novel’s conclusion was ingenious. Life After Life is a long book, as befitting a life lived over and over again, and I savoured its slowness, the returns to where I’d been before, places and people I was happy to revisit. I appreciated the specificity of its detail, the brilliance of its writing, its genre-blurring, its daringness in reframing the shape of a narrative, and yes, this is Kate Atkinson, so there is going to be that too.
April 9, 2013
Books For Sale!
On Saturday morning, Harriet’s playschool (Huron Playschool Cooperative) will hold their annual Book/Toy/Bake Sale to raise funds for the Jenna Morrison Family Trust. This event nicely coincides with my need to rid my house of much of its contents, and so I will be donating a huge pile of adult books to the sale, and some of them are really good.
Good books at good prices for a good cause–what could be better? Come out on Saturday April 13 from 10:00-12:30, 383 Huron St.
April 7, 2013
New kids' books we've been enjoying lately
Mister Dash and the Cupcake Calamity by Monica Kulling and Esperanca Melo: Before reading this book, we’d thought about its title and speculated as to what the calamity might be, and we were wrong wrong wrong. We hadn’t yet read the first Mister Dash book, so we had no idea that Mister Dash himself would be the picture of calmness and civility while the calamity was everything that happened around him. When Madame Croissant decides to start up a cupcake company, she enlists her faithful hound to help (and makes him wear a baker’s hat, much to his dismay). When the tornado that is Madame Croissant’s granddaughter Daphne enters the mix, there has to be cupcake batter scraped off the ceiling and other calamities averted. In every situation, Mister Dash narrowly saves the day, and all are overjoyed in the end to find the cupcake business is a go-go! Especially since Mister Dash is finally allowed to take his silly hat off.
Oy. Feh. So? by Cary Fagan and Gary Clement: I don’t think I’m the target audience for this book, as no one in my family has ever used a lot of Yiddish, but I do know about great aunts and uncles, the kind who would visit on Sundays in enormous automobiles. These relatives at a remove who plant themselves on the couch and aren’t so interested in the children. In Oy. Feh. So?, Aunt Essy, Aunt Chanah and Uncle Sam aren’t interested in anything, all attempts at conversation resulting in their respective signature exclamations, and so one Sunday the kids decide they aren’t going to take it and go to extremes to rattle their unshakably miserable rellies. It’s a funny story that appeals to a similar nostalgia as Barbara Reid’s The Party, the humour underlined by Clement’s cartoon illustrations.
Hoogie in the Middle by Stephanie McLellan and Dean Griffiths: This was one book that did not immediately appeal to my adult kid-lit-loving sensibilities, but I knew something was up when Harriet suddenly couldn’t stop talking about it. (“You be Pumpkin, you be Tweezle, and I’ll be Hoogie,” she’d demand of whoever was in her company, or a variation on this.) I asked her why she liked the book so much: “Because Hoogie’s a monster and she’s nice,” Harriet answered, and I liked that answer. In her family of Muppet-like creatures, Hoogie is not the biggest or the smallest, but she’s stuck in the middle instead–ever too big or too little. Until one day her frustration gets too much and Hoogie explodes, and then her parents take the time and let her know how much they love their monster in the middle (“You’re the sun in the middle of the solar system,” says Dad, as they swing her through the air. “The pearl in the middle of the oyster,” says Mom as they catch her in their arms.”) This is a good teaching book for any middle child, but also (I have a feeling!) useful for any little one suffering a bit of family displacement. Hoogie will help them to articulate their feelings and know they aren’t alone.
What a Party! by Ana Maria Machado and Helene Moreau: This is a bit like those If You Give a Mouse a Cookie books, but so much more interesting, and involving birthday parties, which is a pretty important topic if you happen to be four years old. The book posits what might happen if your mom, in a moment of distraction, tells you to invite “anyone you’d like” to your upcoming party, and then you invite everyone you know, who happens to also resemble the United Nations, and each friend brings a party food from their own particular culture and pets (which are another topic of fascination if you’re four). The party becomes a glorious celebration of delicious food, live music, salsa dancers and a raggae band, and then it goes all night long (which could happen “especially if the parents drop in and start having drinks and chatting instead of going home”). What a Party! is the perfect recipe for the “craziest, wildest, funnest party ever”, Moreau’s illustrations capturing the festive mood perfectly.
April 3, 2013
The Sally Draper Poems
While I never finished reading The Collected Stories of John Cheever, which has been sitting on the table before me now for more than 2 years, my literary obsession with Mad Men continues, as does my obsession with Mad Men in general. (We have spent the last while rewatching the entire series, and are now partway through Season 4. We will save Season 6 until our baby sleeps for at least an hour at a time. Basically, I do not care to acknowledge that there are any other televisions shows in the world.)
So I was overjoyed to read “The Sally Draper Poems”, written by one of my favourite poets Jennica Harper. These poems are so very good, demonstrating Harper’s sharp wit, gift for voice, and her amazing sympathy with a young girl’s perspective. I love the texture that they add to the Mad Men universe.
See also:
- My post, What Sally Draper Must Have Been Reading
- The poem “Don Draper” by Nyla Matuk, who has just been nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
